Floyd John Bradigan

With Father’s Day coming up Sunday, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a man. Not in the way culture often sells us manhood — as dominance, detachment or self-interest — but as duty, humility and endurance. My mind inevitably goes to my father, Floyd John Bradigan. He was the kind of man who showed up. Every day. For his family, his country and his community.

My dad was a decorated World War II bombardier in the Pacific Theater, flying perilous B-24 missions that earned him the respect of his peers and superiors. He spent nine years in the U.S. Army Air Corps, which became the U.S. Air Force in 1947. A gold-oak-leaved major by then, he was settling in for a peripatetic career, but the family farm called him back. He mustered out in 1949, stationed at the time in Japan, just weeks before the Korean War blew up. Alongside his father and uncle, he helped run the family dairy operation in Forestville. But that wasn’t enough to support a growing family of eight, so he took on more: delivering mail on rural routes, driving a school bus, and digging graves — the latter being an elected position in our town, and a fitting role for a man who never flinched from doing the dirty work, and doing it with pride and dignity.

He was also a talented baseball player who could hit for power from both sides of the plate, having played a season of Double A ball in Visalia, Calif., and looking forward to a new contract with the Triple A Rochester Red Wings when Pearl Harbor intervened. But for him, greatness didn’t come on the baseball diamond. It came from showing his kids how to hold a shovel, a canoe paddle, or coach a Little League game or host a Boy Scouts meeting after a 12-hour day. Or how to untangle a fishing line, or unjam a 12-gauge. He took pride in his three-acre garden and his tidy orchard rows, teaching us the virtues of careful cultivation — of land, of family, of character. And every autumn, he ran the best deer hunt in Chautauqua County, a tradition my brother and his grandson continue today, a reminder of how legacy doesn’t have to be complicated — it just has to be consistent.

In 2020, when my brothers joined me on the Ojai podcast, we laughed (and by laugh, I mean winced) at the memory of the endless chores: shoveling manure, pushing wheelbarrows, swinging mattocks, hauling hay bales, weeding row after row. It was work that bonded us, taught us grit, and formed a bedrock for our lives. Looking around today, I worry that far too few young men have access to those lessons these days.

Male disconnection has become a crisis. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly one in seven men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working. A growing number are not even looking for jobs. Suicide rates for men are nearly four times higher than for women. Mental health surveys show that young men are reporting increasing levels of isolation, purposelessness, and despair. The Atlantic has reported on the epidemic of “lost boys” — those drifting through digital spaces and conspiracy channels, searching for meaning where none can be found.

Too many young men are turning away from responsibility because they’ve never seen it modeled in a way that feels meaningful. They’re being sold avatars of masculinity based on Andrew Tate-esque performative aggression or consumption, instead of contribution and care. They need to see real men — not perfect, not posturing, but present. Men like Floyd John Bradigan.

In a world that tells young men they’re either not needed or inherently dangerous, we need more stories like my father’s. Stories of men who build rather than burn, who raise families and fix fences and bury neighbors with dignity. Floyd John Bradigan was modest when it came to talking, he’d rather let the example of his life doing the talking for him. His example reminds us that masculinity, at its best, is not a performance but a promise. One that says: “I will carry my share. I will take care of my own. I will leave this place a little better than I found it.”

That’s the kind of man worth following, one who leaves his children proud and grateful.

Bret Bradigan is the editor of the Ojai Quarterly & Ojai Monthly magazines. He is also host of the Ojai Podcast and co-publisher of the weekly Ojai Vortex newsletter. You can check out his work at OjaiQuarterly.com.